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Show of hands – who has a digital badge, or thinks they might have not sure etc. Reaction to show of hands how many/how few – a minute to talk to those around you that have received one, what you got it for etc. If you’re not near anyone that’s ever received a digital badge – think about any analogue badges you’ve ever received, be they Cub scouts, Brownies, swimming badges, a prefect badge – anything.

Thanks for that!

What is a badge?

It may be easier to think about it the other way – a certificate is an offline badge.

But with a badge extra information, called meta data, is added into the badge. This can include the name of the badge, who it was issued to, who it was issued by, when it was issued, what they did to get that badge – and much more including digital evidence. That evidence can be anything, a video, images, a document, a blog – anything digital or that can be stored digitally.

And it’s just like baking a cake. Once the ingredients, the evidence, is baked into the badge you can’t get it out again or change it. And, because they exist digitally, they’re much easier to share but much harder to lose.

How many of you have a degree certificate or a certificate from your PGCE perhaps? How many of you know where that certificate is right now? How many of you have taken it out of that drawer or cupboard in the last year?

So why do we think people should bother collecting digital open badges? Why are Cambridge English experimenting with them?

They give a more detailed picture of you, your abilities, interests, experience and knowledge. Most people’s CVs include our education, jobs we’ve done, companies we’ve worked for that sort of thing. And, as you’ll see in the jar on the left, there’s a lot of empty space.

With badges all that space can be filled in. An open badge can show your interests with a lot more detail – you can give a more complete picture of your hobbies. And they can carry evidence with them too.

And it’s not just hobbies – at Cambridge English we’ve issued badges for attendees at our webinars for teachers – Roisin will tell you more about that shortly. We think getting that badge shows not just that you turned up to the webinar but that you’re interested in that topic and in your own professional development as a teacher – all things you can say about yourself on your CV but may become more impressive and valid when an organisation like Cambridge English can say it for you.

Imagine if two people apply for the same job and they are identical in almost every way – and they both say they’re interested in professional development… but one of them has badges and can prove it and not just prove it but link to digital evidence of their attendance at webinars or a video of them giving a presentation at a seminars. I know which one I’d want to give the job to.

As you collect more badges you build up a richer and more detailed picture of yourself.

One of the great things about Open Badges is their openness. A good way to think about this is by comparing it to email. Now if, like me, you can remember a time before email – you’ll remember that, when email first arrived it was far from perfect. Sending emails to other people wasn’t always perfect and different email platforms worked in different ways – meaning you beautifully crafted note could end up with a jumble of characters and letters at the other end.

Nowadays email has a set of what are known as open standards – these ways in which emails fundamentally work. So now, if you send an email from Hotmail or Gmail or Outlook for example it works. All the platforms can speak to each other and understand what the other platforms are saying, because they use these open standards.

It’s the same with Open Badges. There are a set of open standards (called the OBI, Open Badges Infrastructure) that, when used, means badges are open and easily transferable across platforms. If you collect Cambridge English badges and decide you want to store them with someone else that’s just fine – all your badges will work on other platforms. And you can change your mind at any point and switch between platforms, and take all your badges with you.

And that covers another important fact about badges. The holder of the badge is in charge. You decide which badges you accept and collect and then you decide who you show which badge to. The badge holder is in control. If you decide to issue a badge to me for being a terrible presenter I may decide not to accept that badge – and even if I did accept it, I might decide not to show it to anyone. Once you start building a badge collection you can decide which badges you show and to whom you show them. It could be you want to show your running club badges to other members of your running club – but perhaps you don’t want to put them on your professional profile or portfolio. So your CV doesn’t have to be 9 pages long to accommodate all your badges, just show off a well chosen few with a route to more details (and all the evidence) if needed.

Lastly, badges can be linked to one another – in a stack. This means that getting one badge may unlock another – badges can be steps along a learning pathway. This is classic gamification which may of you will have heard about – basically making things a little like a computer game in that you cannot unlock a certain stage in the game without having completed certain steps beforehand.

So where is all this likely to lead us in the future?Well – there are some important institutions who are interested in digital badges. For example, a lot of education institutions in the US are adopting them already for some of their programmes. Microsoft, IBM, NASA, the BBC, Disney all of them have open badges.

But it’s not just big institutions – teachers themselves are issuing badges to their students as a motivational tool. Managers could issue them to recognise internal training courses staff take. You could even use them for something like a movie club, for example.

Coventry University are doing a lot of work around how digital badges. They have a brilliantly named team there: ‘The Disruptive Media Learning Lab’ that are investigating how badges might support students’ employability through recognising their learning and skills outside of their main course of study. This is the extra curricular activities and involvement that many employers – when faced with dozens of job applicants, all with a degree – are using to differentiate between people.

It was fascinating to hear from the Coventry University team – as university students are a really interesting audience. Initially they met with a lot of resistance: “Does it mean I have to do extra work?” but very quickly turned around to the students pushing the Learning Lab team, asking why there wasn’t a badge for this, or that. And – of course – they were very quickly trying to work out which badges they could get in exchange for the minimum amount of effort.

We’ve also spoken to people working with digital badges at O2. They’re using them as a way to future-proof their recruitment process. O2 are very conscious of the growing market in wearable technology. Hands up if you have a FitBit or some sort of fitness tracker or step counter on you at the moment? I do. This is a really big space for technology and telecomms companies like O2. But they’re not quite sure where they want to go in that market yet – but when they do, they know they’ll have to move fast – and moving fast means having the right people.

So they’ve developed a range of courses and training around wearable tech and software engineering. These are quite complex and difficult courses – but if you’re already an expert in that field you can skip right to the assessment and get the badge as hundreds of budding engineers already have. And for O2 – when they need to scale up part of their development team, they have a readymade pool of people that they know have already proven their skills in this niche area that they can approach.

Last bit from me – what to do next, if you’re interested in finding out more about badges?

BryanMathers.com is a great place to read about some of the thinking behind badges explained in a really visual and clear way – I’ve used a lot of his artwork in this presentation.

Bryan and a chap called Doug Belshaw have set-up ThinkOutLoudClub – and at that second link you can even earn a badge, for finding out more about badges!

There are lots of badge issuing platforms – on a scale from free to expensive. We use Open Badge Factory – but those other sites are just some of the other platforms out there. I’d really recommend checking them out and try it for yourself – issue yourself, your students or your colleagues some badges and see for how it all works.

We think Open Badges represent a really interesting opportunity in the future of learning. Which leads me to hand you over to my colleague Roisin who can tell you more about the experiments we’ve been running to try out badges ourselves.

Hi – I’m Roisin and I’m going to talk to you about pilot studies we’ve been running using badges to support teachers’ Continuous Professional Development. I’m going to focus mainly on a trial of Open Badges, tied into a series of webinars for teachers.

Today, however, I’m going to focus on the results of a pilot we’ve just run integrated into a series of six webinars on Understanding Assessment which ran from October 16 to March this year. Participants who attended individual live webinars received an Open Badge in place of a traditional Certificate of Attendance. There were a total of six badges teachers could collect one for each of the main areas of assessment covered in the series: speaking; understanding test scores; writing; reading; listening; grammar and vocabulary.

Teachers who attended all six webinars were able to claim our webinar series badge. As this final webinar has only just taken place, we’re currently still tallying up the number of Badge super users we’ve gained through this project! You are also the first people to hear the results of this trial!

The main purpose behind the trial was to explore the potential value and relevance of Open Badges for supporting Continuous Professional Development. With the webinar trial we wanted to find out whether the incentive of earning Open Badges would have any impact on teacher motivation and repeat attendance.

Our starting point was to survey all our webinar attendees to find out how much they and their employers already know about Open Badges and incentivise them to download at least one badge. The trial gave us the opportunity to help educate teachers about how digital Badges can be shared and used.

Throughout the trial, we surveyed teachers to monitor their reaction to the Badges they received, looking at how their attitudes and behaviour around badges changed over the 6-month period: How many actually downloaded the badge, who collected multiple badges, who did they share their badge with, what did or didn’t do with their badge and why/why not? After trialling them, did teachers even want Open Badges?

This project allowed us to gain some valuable insights from teachers which we’d like to share with you today.

To set the context…a quick overview of who took part in our pilot. Teachers from more 87 countries took part in our pilot with most engagement from Europe – namely Italy and Spain – then Russia, Argentina and Ukraine.

Teachers from China and Iran were unfortunately excluded due to local firewall restrictions which prevent them from being able to access our current webinar platform which relies on You Tube and Google.

Respondents were predominantly state schools teachers, private tutors and private language school teachers with good representation from private school teachers the college/university sector.

The majority of respondents were aged 30 – 59 years of age and, surprising to us, nearly 70% of them had 11+ years plus teaching experience which was considerably more than we had anticipated.

At the start of the trial, the majority of these respondents – 63% – claimed to be unfamiliar with Badges and what they can be used for.

An even greater number (70%) claimed that their employers were not at all familiar with Open Badges, so we clearly had an uphill struggle ahead of us!

Over the course of the six month trial we issued around 10,000 badges and on average, 73% of teachers collected their badge each month.

But as you can see from this bar chart, the increase in uptake of badges was a slow process, with only 48% of teachers accepting their badge in the first month, slightly higher than the average of 40% of teachers who typically print our their Certificates of Attendance. 98% of these teachers claimed that this was the first Open Badge they had ever received so we realised we had a lot of work to do in educating these teachers – and through them, their employers, about the potential relevance of Open Badges to them.

There was quite a lot of initial resistance from teachers to accept badges in place of Certificates and our surveys revealed confusion regarding what to do with Badges and how these could be used as evidence of webinar attendance.

When we analysed teachers’ reactions in more detail, we discovered three common reasons for this resistance to early adoption of badges.

Firstly, lack of awareness about the metadata baked into Open Badges resulting in complaints such as these.

"The badge does not show information about name of the participant, day, time. These pieces of information are absolutely necessary“

Secondly, a lack of understanding around what to with the Badge.

We received numerous comments such as these. And it’s not just teachers who struggle to understand the concept of Open Badge…

This is an interesting quote we’ve recently received from an education agent who has just collected a badge following successful completion of a short online training course for Agents..

The final main concern expressed by teachers is the lack of employer recognition.

3% of teachers requested a Certificate of Attendance in addition to the Open Badge and some were extremely vocal about this. There were many requests for a "20th century" certificate which I can print out’

It became clear to us in the early stages of the trial that we still had quite a lot of work to do to to clarify the metadata issue as well as giving teachers ideas regarding what they can do with badges. In fact, all the information that teachers wanted was in their badge, they just didn’t realise it. These teachers hadn’t benefitted from the kind of introduction to Open Badges which Andrew has just given you, so we created a webpage with a video of Andrew explaining the purpose of metadata in a more comprehensible way, and directed teachers to this via the webinar, and a series of emails. You can, of course, also review this video from the comfort of your homes of offices after this conference! We also added in more links to the digital evidence within the badges – adding the link to the video recording of the webinar for example, to provide more evidence for employers of the training teachers had actually undertaken- and made sure teachers were aware of this.

By month two (November), uptake of badges increased dramatically, from 48% in the first month to 81% in line with increased awareness among our audience of what Open Badges are how they can be used. Uptake then stayed constant at an average 73% throughout the remainder of the trial.

In terms of what teachers actually did with their badges, the vast majority (over 70%) added it to their CV; with around 50% printing it off and showing it to their employer. So although these teachers had gone to the effort of collecting digital evidence of their CPD, employers were clearly still requiring them to print the evidence in a traditional way! Around a quarter of teachers added it to Linkedin or to another social network and only around a fifth or teachers shared it electronically.

At the start of the trial, nearly 60% of teachers did not share their badge with anyone, and that figure almost halved by the end of the trial as teachers became more aware of what they could do with their badge. The most noteable increase in sharing was with employers.

When we asked teachers what their employers did with the Badge once they shared with them, we discovered that over half kept a copy for their records; a quarter used it to approve time off work and around 33% did nothing: just acknowledged it.

46% of them claimed that the reaction of people they have shown or shared their badges with was positive

In terms of on teacher motivation and repeat attendance, we noted some interesting trends during the trial.

While repeat attendance at our webinar programme overall increased from an average 40% to 75% over the 6 month period, teachers didn’t seem to be motivated by collecting multiple badges.

You can see here that the majority of teachers collected one badge with only around 2% becoming ‘superbadge users’ and collecting all six badges.

When we surveyed the 2% of teachers who had collected all six badges, 17% of them told us they would not have attended all six of these webinars if we hadn’t offered badges. Of this group, 80% of them told us their main motivation for collecting all six badges was to get sufficient evidence of professional development and one third are strongly in favour of badges replacing certificates.

We also received some positive endorsements such as this one from a new badge fan which shows how th motivational impact of badges tends to increase with familiarity

For the majority of attendees, the main motivators for attendance remained constant throughout: interest in webinar series topic of individual webinar evidence of CPD to earn an open badge.

So - badges are not a silver bullet. Content is still king and is the main motivational factor attracting a large audience to events such as these.

However, as our audience became more informed about badges the motivational impact of badges did increase – in this case from 17% in the early stages of the trial to 25%.

At the end of the trial, we measured familiarity and awareness again and found that lack of awareness of Open Badges had decreased from 63% at the start of the trial to 10%. 13% of teachers and 35% of our Super badge users now claimed to now be fully familiar with Badges compared to 2% at the start of the trial.

Familiarity amongst employers had also increased, though only marginally as we had not targeted them directly in our campaign.

While adoption of Open Badges by employers is a slow process, we are witnessing a more obvious shift in the tertiary sector as this comment from a teacher in Italy reveals and as you heard from Andrew’s presentation at the start of this session.

When asked to vote, 74% of all those those involved in the webinar trial now believe that we should continue to offer digital Open Badges for webinar attendance, the majority claiming they are motivated by evidence of professional development.

To summarise…

We are continuing to assess uptake and interest in Badges and to determine the potential value teachers and their

15.
Metadata
The badge does not show
information about name of the
participant, day, time. These
pieces of information are
absolutely necessary.
I prefer the Certificate of
Attendance – it’s more
transparent.

16.
Usage of Open Badges
It still remains unclear how I
can use it. If it’s possible,
would be great to get more
exact instructions.
I don’t quite understand what
to do with it.

17.
Employer recognition
I do not like the format. My
administrative office wants a
document, not a badge.
Employers are used to see
papers, certificates, etc. I don't
know if they will take them in
serious. I think provision of letter
or certificate of attendance
would be also useful.
My employer prefers them to
be in Pdf format.

20.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Add it to my Linkedin profile and/or
other social network
Print it off and show it (e.g. to
employer)
Add it to my CV Share it electronically
Nov (Scoring) Dec (Writing) Jan (Reading)
What did you do with your badge?

23.
Super badge users
I didn't mean to collect them but now
that I have them I'm really satisfied

24.
Motivations for attending the webinar
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
I am interested in this
series of webinars on
Understanding
Assessment
I need evidence of
Continuous Professional
Development
I want to earn an Open
Badge
I want to know more
about the topic
Other
Nov (Scoring) Dec (Writing) Jan (Reading)

25.
Motivations for attending the webinar
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
I am interested in this
series of webinars on
Understanding
Assessment
I need evidence of
Continuous Professional
Development
I want to earn an Open
Badge
I want to know more
about the topic
Other
Nov (Scoring) Dec (Writing) Jan (Reading)

26.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Not at all familiar Slightly familiar Quite familiar Fully familiar
Percentageofrespondents
October March
How familiar are you with Open Badges?

28.
Employer recognition
It’s a slow process but more and
more institutions or universities are
adopting badges … especially
universities delivering MOOCs …
Letizia Cinganotto
National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and
Educational Research (INDIRE), Italy

29.
Teacher testimonials
Your webinars and open badges are great! Well done, Cambridge!
Very good support for our continuing professional development. Many
thanks for this badge, wish you more success!
It was a great webinar. I learned a lot and its even better with the badge
system to actually prove what we've learned.
I loved the content of the webinar. Better with this open badge now.

30.
• Content is king
• Prime motivation for adoption by teachers is evidence of
professional development
• Motivational impact of badges increases with familiarity
• Uptake by employers relies on teacher influence
• Adoption in the tertiary sector is influencing wider adoption
Summary findings

31.
Continue:
 issuing Open Badges for webinar attendance and integrated
into thedigitalteacher.com
 raising awareness among the teaching community and
employers.
Research:
 what else to badge: attendance at face to face seminars;
training courses?
 how to recognise learning: non-certified courses?
 badges for qualifications: which ones?
Open Badges: what next?